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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Why do leaders think lying, or obfuscating works so well? My personal experience has been when you let people know the facts and act on them, it is amazing what happens. Every time that bad news is delivered to my team directly, be it the loss of a major account, a financial crisis, or even a legal problem, the collective intelligence of the team often finds the solution. I've had interns rescue accounts (oh, my uncle is the CEO there), engineers solve legal problems (what if we just asked if we could move service X over to them and finish the contract with that instead of unneeded canceled service), and incredible suggestions on cost-cutting instead of layoffs. None of these things happen when the team doesn't know because some executive was afraid of telling the truth.

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I'm in the US tech market specifically, and sorry for a bit of salt. This is all opinion but I wanted to share anyway.

> My personal experience has been when you let people know the facts and act on them, it is amazing what happens.

It is common for management in the US to become a middleman that effectively acts as a low-value-add component between leadership above them, and the IC's below them. To be a high-value-add it's a complex game of social skills, making people happy, compromise, individual attention/listening, domain knowledge/experience, etc etc. I'll be the first to admit - every time I've had to be a leader it's been incredibly difficult. Although it's common sense, I'm reminded every time that it's very hard to manage problems outside of your own headspace - and that's a hard pill to swallow as a SWE!

Back to the low-value-add manager though... there's a lot of them out there. And for ego, or self-preservation at the company, etc they want to be the end-all/be-all for solutions/innovation that's happening in their team. Ie: if it didn't originate from them they don't want to hear about it, and when presenting to their leadership all of their team's accomplishments are because of them. Often they keep their employees stuck in-place with fear of termination, push-out the high-achievers who will challenge status-quo, and self-market like crazy to increase their standing in the org.

> Why do leaders think lying, or obfuscating works so well?

Because they're playing a different game than you are as an actual leader. Many managers will lie, obfuscate, and generally be assholes because it's how lazy/unsophisticated people get what they want - regardless if it's layoffs or just the normal day-to-day. I know the question is rhetorical but when I read it I blurted out loud "because people suck!" drinking my morning coffee =)

It's incredibly hard to deliver bad news with the right tone. The objective is to deliver precise, true information, and have people go and think (not guess) what's the impact on them.

Conversly, it's really easy to sound as if you don't care enough, or be openly frustrated and deflecting responsibility to someone else (especially if that's justified). This way you end up with people angry at individuals, and not thinking about the next steps (whether getting their own career in order, or continuing the project in a different setup).

Lying, or being wishy-washy is the path of least resistance. I think managers are getting paid to do uncomfortable things and with time might become awesome even in these hard situations, but YRMV.

I think it largely comes down to fear. Fear that if people find out they'll leave, or retaliate or some such. Also, a lot of people aren't (or will ever be) prepared to be in management positions. Some wanted to try it and are stuck and others got pushed into it.

Delivering bad news is hard, and it's to try easy and avoid it. It's like firing people. A number of managers would rather wait until its someone else problem rather than doing what needs to be done. It causes everyone problems in avoiding it, but doing what needs to be done appears to be a far worse course of action to many.

That is exactly my experience. The answer to "Why didn't you just tell the truth?" usually starts with "I was afraid that ..."

Most of the time the fear was unfounded or at best, a better outcome that what happens when employees lose trust in leadership.

Most of the time it happens because higher management don't find the lower staffs valuable, and seeing them as merely cost center and resources.

In their mind, it's easier to just lay them off, and rehire when the condition gets better. Input from lower staffs will be seen negative and obfuscating. They are lying to shift the blame to lower staffs and save face, it'll be useful when rehiring process come.

If they honestly said layoff to cut cost because of low budget, the news can spread and future new hires may be concerned with it. But if you said it's because the staffs performance and / or they don't need their specialization now, future new hires won't concerned much with it.

I don't think it's fear, ego, or whatever other answers here have suggested. It's pure profit motivated. If employees knew things were going to hell, would they keep working or start looking for new jobs? The latter case has a higher chance to make the ship sink faster as employees leave, features would be put on hold, client obligations may go unfulfilled, and ultimately leading to loss of profit/revenue. That would not look good to shareholders, and to the golden handcuffs that may be hovering over VP heads when they also get laid off (they have metrics they are judged on too, you know).

That's why we hear so many stories of startups suddenly going bankrupt, leaving the grunt employees going, "huh"? They want to keep everyone on-board, working 100% efficiency, so that the elites at the top can reap everything before things go to crap.

That's pretty much it. All other reasons don't make sense when you include the entire hierarchy of a corporate structure and the goal of any company (it's money).

That's why telling the truth is so hard, because it affects the company's bottom line, whereas your life being inconvenienced doesn't. So companies just lie, or stay quiet until they have to tell the truth last minute.

Employees always know what's going on. You can't hide the truth from the people who directly experience it every day. And these people talk.

I'm always amazed when managers feel the need to keep upbeat and "dispel the rumors" to the exact people who started the "rumors." Even as a developer, I have excellent insight into customers. I remember working for a company whose product usage fell off of a cliff. I certainly noticed how loads on our servers fell long before the sales team got additional training to combat the falling renewal rates or before the layoffs hit.

>> Why do leaders think lying, or obfuscating works so well? <<

because it got them where they are today ?

Cowardice and CYA behavior is usually the answer.

Face-saving.

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